Here we are in one of the most famous places in the whole world: Saint Peter’s Square! While you’re here, you experience the Church of the past, thinking of Saint Peter and the early martyrs, but you also experience the vivid Church of the now. Rome isn’t just a museum; Rome is a living classroom of what the faith is about. I appreciate your company and I hope you’re enjoying Rome as much as we are.

We’re in luck, folks! We made it to Saint Peter’s Basilica bright and early. The message here in Saint Peter’s Basilica is that Jesus is not a lifeless body in the arms of His mother, but is risen from the dead, and is now alive in Holy Mother Church!

So claims the legendary sports announcer of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Vin Scully.

The Synod has acknowledged anew what God’s people have known “from the beginning”: that to live a loving, lifelong, faithful, life-giving marriage takes sacrifice, hard work, and heroic virtue.

To believe this to be possible, as Vin Scully would remind us, is “most optimistic.”

Perhaps this is one of the reasons many of our young people do not get married. Recent studies in the United States tell us that only 50% of our young people now approach the sacrament of matrimony. Live together? Yes. Marry? …